US faces historic foreign policy test

‘Be careful what you wish for’ may be the watch-phrase at this time of extraordinary flux in the Middle East, but having embarked on a course there is no turning back for the Obama administration, its friends and allies.

The White House, having urged Egypt’s embattled President
Hosni Mubarak
to go “now" in the interests of a peaceful transition to democratic rule, can hardly re-embrace the ageing dictator, who is resisting pressure to step aside.

These are extremely complex, high-stakes moments in United States diplomacy in a volatile region where a policy miscalculation might unravel a tight skein of American commercial and strategic interests across the Middle East, with negative implications for the global economy including that of Australia.

Nowhere will events in Egypt and America’s role in seeking to bring about a peaceful transition to an as yet undefined democratic model be watched with more obsessive interest – and greater alarm – than in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family will be asking itself whether it might be next, in a country where democratic freedoms are significantly less.

Egypt has elections, at least, even if they are rigged, and elements of a fairly robust free media: none of this exists in Saudi Arabia, whose proven oil reserves dwarf those of all other producers. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Saudi King Abdullah has voiced his support for Mubarak and, by implication, his criticism of
Barack Obama
.

American friendship and linkages across the region are being strained by these latest events, including in Israel, which has long congratulated itself on being the “only democracy" in the Middle East, implying moral superiority. Whether a democratic process in neighbouring Egypt that involved the Muslim Brotherhood would be regarded as a desirable “democratic" outcome is moot.

This is a moment in world history that may prove to be as significant as the 1956 Suez crisis, which ended badly for the West.

Britain, France and Israel had simultaneously attacked Egypt after then president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain’s mishandling of the crisis in collaboration with the French and Israelis as part of a “tripartite alliance" prompted then US president Dwight Eishenhower’s memorable intervention, demanding withdrawal. Britain’s prime minister at the time, Anthony Eden, later resigned after being accused of misleading Parliament.

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The Suez crisis marked the beginning of the end of Britain’s global power and ushered in a period in the Middle East during which America has been able to portray itself as the honest broker, albeit with difficulty in recent years because of its ties to Israel.

Against this background, another American president has inserted himself into a Middle East crisis that is every bit as unpredictable as Suez was. But in some ways the stakes may be even higher since the wider Middle East is potentially as volatile, if that is possible, as ripples from Cairo’s Tahrir Square – and the streets of Tunisia before that – spread across the region.

Obama’s handling of the crisis will become a case study of how America manages these sorts of events, and judgments will be made depending on how things turn out.

No one at this stage can predict the outcome, not just in Egypt, but elsewhere in the Middle East.

A young US president’s intervention should be applauded, however, by democrats everywhere. Despite a strange observation by a columnist in this newspaper that support for the demonstrators on Tahrir Square represented a “soft left" position (“The Brotherhood looms large", February 3), intellectual backing for the Egyptian protesters’ aims comes from across the board, right and left.

True, many on the right have voiced their concerns about a Muslim Brotherhood takeover by stealth at the ballot box, as happened with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But this does not need to occur in Egypt, where there is a strong secular tradition stunted by years during which democratic impulses were suppressed.

Furthermore, it is erroneous to view the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as necessarily monolithic, or without a sense of responsibility.

Suggestions that the Ikhwan’s low-key participation in the Egyptian disturbances is evidence of its connivance and the fact it is biding its time may have some validity, but this is a weak argument for the status quo.

The status quo has eroded under the weight of the Mubarak regime’s mismanagement and the quiescence of successive US administrations that preferred to deal with the devil they knew rather than the alternative of uncertainty – or, in former secretary of state
Condoleezza Rice
’s words in a speech in Cairo in 2005, “stability at the expense of democracy".

Now, we have uncertainty in spades, which is why this is easily the most significant foreign policy test of the Obama administration.

As circumstances stand, this is­ a­ ­foreign policy conundrum within a foreign policy conundrum for an administration struggling to chart a new course.

As James Baker, secretary of state in the George Bush-senior era, put it during the week: “This is a textbook example of why it’s hard to conduct foreign policy.

“In the implementation of our foreign policy we need to consider principles and values, yes, democracy, human rights, freedom. But we also have to consider the national interest, whether or not the particular entity we’re dealing with is aligned with the United States or not. And those two considerations meet head-on in this conflict."